Box And Whisker Plot Excel How To Structure Your
Box And Whisker Plot Excel Software Like MINITAB
Box And Whisker Plot Excel Series Markers Instead

Excel provides built-in functions that you will need to calculate the quartiles used for the box part of the box and whisker plot.

You can jump right in by downloading the free Box Plot Template below, but I also suggest you read through the information below which describes how the functions and calculations used to create a box and whisker plot.

Enter your data into the Data sheet and the chart in the Plot worksheet will update automatically.

To show all outliers, try Jon Peltiers Chart Utility add-in.

There are a couple ways around this problem and both of these alternate methods are included as additional worksheets in the file.

Box And Whisker Plot Excel Series Markers Instead

You can shift the data so that it is positive before creating the box plot and (2) you can avoid the use of bar charts and display Q1, Q3, and the Median using series markers instead.

Box And Whisker Plot Excel How To Structure Your

It is much easier to create these plots in Excel if you know how to structure your data.

The upper edge of the box plot is the third quartile or 75th percentile.

You may want to check out my article on percentiles for more details about how percentiles are calculated.

If the distribution is symmetric, the median will be exactly in the middle.

If the median is closer to Q1, the distribution is positively skewed.

The first series (bottom column) is Q1 and the border and area properties are set to none so that the column is not visible in the chart.

These two series, stacked together make up the interquartile range.

The area property is set to none for these two series to create just the outline for the box.

Because of the ease of calculation, the convention for the length of the whisker that I have used in the box plot template comes from 1.

The reason this is a problem is because you dont necessarily know how many outliers there will be.

Therefore, instead of showing a point for each outlier, the box plot template above plots only the max and min values if they are outliers.

For reference, the number of upper and lower outliers is given in the table to indicate if there are more outliers than just the max or min.

Box And Whisker Plot Excel Software Like MINITAB

Most good statistical software like MINITAB will be able to include these additional features.

When using this template to create an image for a publication, you can use the following citation (or one appropriate for your papers format).

Microsoft and Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Vertex42.com is not associated with Microsoft.

Box And Whisker Plot For Mac Excel